Nostalgia for a Forbidden Future

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Nostalgia for a Forbidden Future

Long before moviegoers had heard of quantum mechanics, they'd seen a quantum mechanic. He was the guy in Forbidden Planet who fixed the atomic pistols.

Perhaps the most influential sci-fi film of the 1950s, Planet is filled with hints of real science to come. It's got teleporters and laser guns, electronic music and Freudian doublespeak. To audiences in 1956 the film was a landmark, the Matrix of its era, a movie that looked and sounded brand new.

Unfortunately, Forbidden Planet, which is celebrating its 50th birthday with a multi-disc DVD release, hasn't aged particularly well. Most 21st-century movie viewers would have trouble distinguishing it from other '50s sci-fi. It has the same plastic look, the same goofy two-dimensional effects and the same gray-suited white males flying their sleek spaceship as a dozen other films from the era.

But Planet gives us a sense of where contemporary sci-fi came from, and how far it has traveled since.

Planet follows a United Planets spaceship (it looks like a Frisbee with a hat) on a mission to the distant planet Altair-IV, where a group of explorers were grounded 20 years earlier. The only survivors are Dr. Morbius (played by Walter Pidgeon), his mini-skirted daughter Alta (Anne Francis) and a handy robot named Robby, along with a dazzling array of clicking, whirring machines.

These machines constitute sci-fi's biggest supercomputer – 40 square miles of self-repairing processing power. Designed 2,000 centuries ago by higher beings, this technological marvel has taught itself how to invade the minds of humans. So any mortals who get too close find their darkest desires – their "monsters of the id" – brought to full and destructive life. It is, by and large, the same premise that drives Solaris, the sci-fi classic by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky that was later remade by Steven Soderbergh.

That's just one example of how Planet's ideas were plundered by subsequent sci-fi. According to Anne Francis, Gene Roddenberry acknowledged that Planet served as a central inspiration for Star Trek, and you can see it in the teleportation machines, the sleek, futuristic outfits and the spaceship-as-military-expedition template. Robby, the personable, subservient machine (and a recent inductee into the Robot Hall of Fame), is clearly a precursor to R2-D2 and C-3PO.

And Planet featured the then-radical sounds of Louis and Bebe Barron, collaborators with John Cage and Anaïs Nin who built prototypes of electronic instruments. The Barrons' soundtrack of ominous hums and machine noises surely inspired Walter Murch's music for THX 1138, the film that launched George Lucas' career.

With so much radical stuff happening, it's easy to look past the clunky dialogue and performances, and imagine the visionary film that Planet was 50 years ago.